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I think anyone reading this blog is likely to be aware that the fylfot is a very common motif in Iron Age and Medieval geometric patterns. It is present in some of the brocaded Viking patterns I wove last year, such as the Mammen band and Birka 6. Before I started work on these bands, I asked my friends what they thought about including this motif in my weaving. People seemed to fall into two camps:It would offend me, not because I think you are aligning yourself with Nazi philosophies, but because you are showing insensitivity to the fact that I may be offended. Don't do it.It wouldn't offend me, but I still wouldn't do it if I were you because it would offend other people.I am quite annoyed that the Nazis have gone and ruined such a perfectly good motif (I mean, obviously, in terms of Bad Thing The Nazis Did, this doesn't really rate, but you know what I mean). I also find the self-perpetuating nature of camp 1 to be somewhat frustrating. I don't mean to dis…

I have become interested recently in the medieval Finnish bands such as the Kaukola and Humikkala bands that appear in Hansen and the Kirkkomäki band described by Silja Penna-Haverinen in NESAT X. Imagine my delight when Silja herself commented on my previous post on the subject and said she would be willing to answer some questions I had. I thought I would share some information from her answers that might be of interest to people.

1. I feel a bit better about not being able to work out how the technique of altering the places of two adjacent tablets at the intersection of two diaonal lines works, because Silja says this research is out of date. Actually what was thought to be the two central tablets is only a single tablet (the pattern has an odd number).

2. Apparently there is no good source of photos of the Finnish bands from earlier than the 20th century (not even in Finnish publications), which is quite sad. There are some random published photos, but not any kind of compilatio…

OK, so I said I'd do Snartemo V and here it is. It is from Phiala's pattern, with a few tweaks, and also a few points where I lost track of where I was up to and did the motifs in the wrong order!

This is one of the few bands I have done where there is actually a decent pciture of the original (click through to a larger version). You can see that my own version is a lot more stretched out than the original which is if anything about shorter than square. I found it impossible to get the weft density up using sticky wool.

A local, Aelfric Branwelather, offered to make me some wooden tablets at Canterbury Faire this year, and I've finally had a chance to try them out this month. The tablets are about 5cm square and 1.5mm thick. I had to finish sanding them myself, but they are working very well.

Warp: Dark green and white wool (fibreholics)Weft: same as above (varying colour)Pattern: I made it upCards: 15Width: 8mmLength: ~60cm

I had a band all strung up on my Oseberg loom that I had been using at String Day to demonstrate doubleface techniques. Most of it was still unused at the end of the day so I needed to find something to use it for.

I'd recently been reading Silja Penna-Haverinen's article in NESAT X: Patterned Tablet-Woven Band - In Search of the 11th Century Textile Professional, in which she hypothesises that bands from medieval Finland employed 180-degree turns. Her article focuses on a band found in the Kirkkomäki burial ground in Turku, but she mentions that the Masku Humikkala band uses the same techniques, and I think that the Kaukola band in Hansen falls into the same category.

According to the article, 180-degree turns occur in pairs on either side of a reversal, giving the appearance of a tighter corner. There is also mention of a 180-degree turn in c…

Lowrens has made me another warp spreader. The first one he made was in the style of Teffania's - a rod with hole drilled through it. This gels with what can be seen in the few manuscript pictures which show warp spreaders. There are about 7 manuscripts listed in EPAC (including the errata) which contain warp spreaders, out of a total of 33, so I suppose if there's one thing which can be concluded it is that use of the warp spreader is optional (possibly dependent on how prone the warp fibres are to tangling). Of those seven, I have managed to lay eyes on 4:Book of Hours Duke John of Bedford, ca 1420-1430. Vienna, Österreichisches NationalBibliothek, ms. 1855, fol 25 (at right)Book of Hours, ca. 1407. Oxford, Bedleian Library, ms. Douce 144, fol 19Book of Hours, Paris, ca. 1400-1410, Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek KB 76 Fol 21French tapestry in Rheims Cathedral, France, ca. 1507-1530 (below)There are apparently another couple in Des Cleres et Noble Femmes but the picture of …

OK, so it was almost a month ago, but I said I would mention String Day, so here we go. 4 weeks ago my flatmate Thordis and I hosted a fibrecraft-themed collegium type thingy at our house. There was weaving, tablet weaving, inkle weaving, bobbin lace, knitting, naalbinding, spinning and dyeing, all going on in an ad hoc manner. We got a great turnout, including a couple of people who flew down from Ildhafn to attend, and because it was hosted at our house, the event was free. I recommend the format.

Mistress Katharina, one of the Ildhafners, took quite a few photos, which can be seen here.

Someone asked earlier today on the SCA-Card-Weaving list whether anyone had a pattern for the Kaukola band in Hansen. This prompted me to re-visit my pattern and check it against Hansen, since I've recently found instructions on how to read his mysterious patterns. It turns out the pattern I reconstructed by looking at his band was slightly off, so I've re-jigged my pattern to reflect that. The difference to the appearance of the finished band is pretty trivial. There are just a few extra reversals in column 4. They don't change what colour is up at any point, just the direction of twist.

I did have this pattern marked up for half-turns but I've been informed this is incorrect so I've removed them.

The name "Snartemo" is given to a technique where each hole in a tablet is threaded with a different colour, and tablets are offset a quarter turn from each other so that turning them as a pack produces diagonal lines. Sometimes a card is turned repreatedly backward and forward, forming "floats" where a single colour appears on the top for several passes of the weft. The canonical Snartemo band is Snartemo V, from 7th century Snartemo, Norway. Hansen lists three other bands in a similar technique.

This is the band I warped up while demonstrating how to do a Continuous Warp. It is the demonstration pattern (Excel format) Phiala gives showing how to construct a Snartemo pattern, with the green and blue warps swapped because that's how I absentmindedly warped it up. I've also marked the reversal…

At String Day one of the things I wanted to demonstrate was a continuous warp. If you haven't seen Linda Hedrickson's video on making a continuous warp, you should really go watch it now. She explains the concept beautifully. I will take issue with one thing she says:

It doesn't really matter which colours go in which holes

I'm sure this was accurate within the wider context of her DVD and this is probably obvious to most of you, but it can matter. If you're doing a doubleface pattern, the two warps of the same colour need to be in adjacent holes. If you're doing a snartemo pattern red-green-blue-yellow, you can't thread the cards up red-blue-green-yellow.

I demonstrated the continuous warp on an inkle loom. Instead of the clamp arrangement in Linda Hendrickson's video (which works equally well warping directly onto an oseberg-style loom) where the warps pass from clamp A to clamp B and then back to clamp A, and you drop a card on each side, my warp…

While I was weaving the "satin" band, I considered that the poor result might be due to the warp twining going in the same direction as the ply of the silk, so I tried reversing the direction to improve things. Unfortunately it turned out the warp twining was already going in the reverse direction to the ply, so this did nothing to help things! Later on once I'd given up on the card idling I also tried weaving in both directions.Above is a picture of the four different combinations:Warp twining opposite to ply twining, card idlingWarp twining same as ply twining, card idlingWarp twining opposite to ply twining, no card idlingWarp twining same as ply twining, no card idlingIn retrospect the other one does look best, I think, and the last one definitely the worst.

I've known since early on that a twill band will tend to spiral on itself when not under tension, and that the way to counteract this is to have a few cards going in the other direction. EPAC mentions it (p. 68), saying:Generally, at least two tablets at each edge are threaded in the opposite direction, or alternating S and S, to compensate for the twisting of the band which is inherent in this type of weave.I'm sure I read elsewhere that alternating at one end of the band only was sufficient but I can't find a reference for that now. That's what I did for the "scrolling vine" band which was my first foray into twill bands. I didn't have any problem with spiralling so it seemed that doing a SSSSSSSSSSSSZ weave was sufficient to avoid any problems in that area.

However, the plain (no brocade) band I've just finished, which was threaded ZSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSZ, had quite an extreme twist on it. It turns out that the "reverse the edges" plan is …

I decided a while ago that I wanted to have a go at the "simulated satin effect" band from Þóra Sharptooth's Three Tablet Weaving Recipes page. So I did- but it seems I did every imaginable thing wrong in the process! Here's a list:No loom: because I was taking this band travelling with me, I did it backstap style. This is the only band I have woven without two fixed tension points (whether it be 2 chairs, my Oseberg loom, or an inkle loom), excluding the tubular cord I did around Christmas. The tension of this band was all over the placeUsing a new type of silk: This was the first outing of the silk I got from colourmart. The silk from colourmart is great value and the customer service is very friendly, but this silk turned out to be a lot stickier than what I was used to (closer to how wool behaves) which didn't help anythingFailur…

I don't know if this is common knowledge and I'm just out of the loop, but a friend recently pointed out to me that it was possible to get wonderfully high-resolution (specifically, 2500 pixels on the wider axis) photos of items from the V&A if you become a "member". It goes like this:Go to https://collections.vam.ac.ukClick the "Log in" button at top right.Fill out the "Or Register" form on the right-hand side of the page. You are now a member.Search for the item in the collection you fancy and click on the thumbnail of the one you like.At the right of the page, below the summary information, there is an "Order this image" button. Click it.You'll be taken to the "Manage your orders" which is kinda like your shopping cart. You can add up to 30 images to a single order.When you're done choosing the images you want, click the the "Place order now" button. The first time you do this you'll be asked to f…

This band is for my friend Kotek. He wanted a band that looked something like the one in the pictured below, which is from Leonhart Fuchs's De Historia Stirpium There's no particular reason to think this band was tabletwoven; it could well have been embroidered. But there were tabletwoven bands around at the time.

I designed a pattern that looked like it would be at home in Anna Neuper's Modelbuch. It didn't really turn out with as much brocade showing as I wanted because I failed to take into account the way that alternating under-over-under with the brocade just looks like it's under all the time (I guess it would have looked better if my pickups had been under one strand only). But it still looks very pretty.

I wove the whole thing at the Lindisfarne encampment held by Ordo Cygni over Queen's Birthday weekend (5-7 June). I had to weav…

Ok, so remember how I said that although the illuminations show weavers sitting facing their band looms directly, I had to sit sideways to my Oseberg loom when I was weaving, because the crossbeam was at knee-height? That was true, but it wasn't the whole truth.

At Canterbury Faire I was weaving the Baltic S-motif, which is not a brocaded pattern. When I got home and set up my loom there, I realised I could turn my chest seat on its side, which would make it low enough for my knees to fit under the bar. I set up the loom so I was weaving from left to right, and I wove the rest of the band doing a passable job of sitting face-on (no pictures, sorry).

However, when I tried to do the same thing with a brocaded pattern, it just didn't work. When the band went from left to right, so the tiedowns were picked up to the left of the cards, I couldn't work out an efficient way to hold my hands. And when the band went from right to left, I just found myself gravitating to the old s…

Here's the long-promised post about the Oseberg loom made for me by Iarnulf. Here's a link to Plate 13 from Osebergfunnet Vol. 2 with line drawings of the loom. Iarnulf has copied the dimensions closely. The wood is spruce and macrocarpa while the original was beech. The loom stands about a metre tall and is just under 2m in length. Here's a photo, taken before it was oiled.

It feels great to be weaving on a documentable loom. Because it breaks down into pieces it's also very convenient for taking to camping events. The goodly length means you can go for a long time without having to reverse your twine direction (As I've mentioned before, it does make it very inconvenient for setting up in the living room!).

If I had one complaint it would be that the crossbar is right where my knees want to be when sitting on my chest seat which means I can't have my lap directly below where I'm weaving so the bobbins can drop there when not in use. This could easily …

This band is a belt for Sinech, a local SCAdian who does beautiful embroidery. Her persona is 8th century Irish but lacking documentation for tablet weaving going on around there we decided on a knotwork pattern based on a band from 11th century Riggisberg, Switzerland. It's on page 170 of EPAC. The original had 146 tablets but I created a dumbed down version with only 67.

I wove this band on the inkle loom, like the last one. Here's a picture of it in progress. Brocade weft coverage is not great but the pattern is still quite striking. Since this is a belt I put slits in the blank areas of the pattern in the middle section of the band. This worked a lot better than it did on the "Anglo-Saxon" belt from last year- the slits are pretty much invisible. This is more an artefact of the weaving techniqu…

I turned on Google Analytics recently and have discovered that Poland is right up there with New Zealand (where I live) and the US in terms of number of visits to this blog, over 3x more than Australia and Denmark which are tying for 4th place. Additionally, Poland makes up over 40% of my worldwide direct traffic! Not that it isn't great to have you around but I am curious as to what led you here. Would anyone like to offer an explanation in the comments?

A bonus fun fact is that over 80% of all my visitors are on Windows but only 12% are using Internet Explorer :-)

Here are the different types of wooden bobbin I have been using recently. All three are made by local artisans. The top one is made by Ronan Mac Brian and is inspired by the reel in The Medieval Household- the same one pictured in this post in Haandkraft. This bobbin wasn't designed for tablet weaving and the wide section is just a little top wide for passing through the shed. It works very nicely for reeling thread onto, which is handy for when you want to do a continuous warp and need to have the same colour on more than one reel.

The second one is one of three is by Lowrans Wilyamson and along with the warp spreader he made me was payment for the bands I made for his Lady earlier this year. He made them after a discussion we had about the bobbins in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves although as you can see they aren't that similar. Lowrans wasn't at all sold on the bifurcation- partly because I couldn't think of a good reason for it, and partly because it would h…

I recently noticed that I am the #1 hit on Google for 'evebo pattern' (and second for 'evebo "tablet weaving') which has made me feel a little guilty since there's no such pattern to be found here.

However, there is a pattern to be found on the web- you need to join the SCA-Card-Weaving yahoo group to access it, but the group has all sorts of interesting discussions and if you're keen enough on tablet weaving to be into 3/1 broken twill, you'll probably enjoy being on it anyway. If not, you can set the group to not send you any emails, or join it just long enough to get the file. The pattern is in the Files section, in a file called "Evebo creatures.zip". It is in GTT format. You can download GTT from here.

Lacking any actual tabletwoven bands to base the pattern I was weaving for my friend Maheshti on, we ended up deciding on a pattern from a medieval middle-eastern embroidery sampler. Unfortunately I forgot to note down the name of the book or any more specific information- I will ask Maheshti and see if she remembers!

The pattern is very diagonal-centric, so I decided to use Egyptian diagonals for it. As mentioned in my previous post, this is even less documentable than other techniques such as doubleface and brocade, but it fits the pattern well, Maheshti didn't seem bothered, and I'll be honest, it's not like I have much excuse to make Egyptian diagonal bands for my own uses so I may as well take what chances I get.

This is the first band where I have created the pattern myself. Luckily it's pretty easy to do with this technique.

A friend of mine recently asked me to do some Middle Eastern tablet weaving for her. I set to work, looking to see what I could document. Result? Nothing. I don't know whether they weren't doing tablet weaving in period, they were but the evidence doesn't survive or isn't widely available in English, or if I'm just looking in the wrong places. My friend wasn't going to let that get in the way of some pretty trim, so I changed my focus from "What tablet weaving did they do in the Middle East?" to "What is the least implausible technique to use for tablet weaving in the Middle East?" The answer I came up with was brocaded or doubleface. Please note that I am NOT suggesting that I have evidence that these techniques were practised in the Middle East in period. All the examples I could come up with were a) created either outside the Middle East or out of period and b) made by Christians (My friend's persona is Ara…

Peter Collingwood's The Techniques of Tablet Weaving is probably the most comprehensive book out there on tablet weaving in general. It also contains a lot of information on (SCA) period bands. However since the book is organised by technique and not by time or place, it can be hard to track these details down. Below for my own reference and that of other people is a list of items from the SCA period that I have found from skimming the 2002 book. If you notice something I've missed (and I'm bound to have missed something!) please let me know.p108, 208, plate 167 Maniple of St Ulrich, diagonals and brocadingp109 Egyptian diagonals including medieval Finnish bandsp114, 217 12th century Sicilian Orphrey, diagonals and brocadingp117 12th century belt of Philip of Swabia, checkerboard effect with warp twiningp119 9th-10th century Germanic (Augsburg and Speyer) bands, lettering with warp twiningp122 "Anglo-Saxon" belt with card idling- more recent research suggests …

I wanted to try a non-brocaded pattern at Canterbury Faire and this seemed like a pretty gentle introduction. This is the band from Kaukola mentioned on page 109 of Collingwood. It is from 11th-13th century Finland. It is covered in Hansen, pattern included. This is the first time I've tried to follow a non-brocade pattern out of Hansen. People had warned me that Hansen's patterns are not the clearest but this was my first personal encounter with them (It didn't help that I was working from the Danish version of the book). In the end I abandoned the pattern and just worked it out from the picture of the reconstruction. The pattern is only 7 tablets wide so it wasn't too hard to work out and would have been trivial if I'd done any patterns with Egyptian diagonals …

Well, I think the time has come- the next two bands I will be writing about are not brocaded. So I've changed the name of the blog to "Adventures in Historical Tabletweaving". There will be more brocaded bands, but they probably won't be in the majority any more.

Here are the details on the further tablet woven bands I found when going through Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters. In addition there were a few that mentioned tablet woven bands without giving any details on their composition, and many more that mentioned "gold bands" which I assume were probably tablet woven.

5. Two fragments of a cingulum (Augsburg, Diocesan Museum, late 9th century)

a) Red tablet-woven silk band with narrow, yellow-green edges. Inscription, created through different directions of the warp strands: IN NOMINE DOMINI AILBECUND VE ... VXPI (Christ) IHEV (Jesus) NOSTRI IN NOMINE DOME (Domini). The end of the band is bound with gold bands. In the middle of the band are sewn on little silver frames (5x4cm), in which under glass one finds a piece of silk (probably little bits of the sewn-on stripes from b). On the back side of the silver frame, seal impressions. Length 123.5cm, width 3.8cm. Materially and technically belonging together with Queen Hemma's gird…

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, here's a list of the contents of Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters, in case it's of use to anyone. If anyone happens to be interested in one of the items here let me know and I'll provide the text and/or picture(s) of the item in question. It's a bit long so it's after the jump. Sorry for any oddities in the translation. Items in italics come with pictures.

While writing this up I found a few more mentions of tablet weaving, which I'll write up separately.

As mentioned in the previous post, theses bobbins were part of the payment for the Birka 6 bands I'm making for Bjorn. They are based on an item in the Swedish Historical Museum (pictured below). In addition, they look a little like the bobbin in the picture at the end of this post, which a scene of the annunciation from a Festal Missal of Savoy (Den Haag, KB 128 D 30, fol. 37r, c. 1460).

The bobbins work well for tablet weaving, having a wide neck making them quick to wind thread onto, but a narrow profile making them easy to pass through the shed. However, lacking any notches or other way to stop them from unravelling, they do tend to unwind when in use which can be a bit annoying.

This band is for Bjorn, in return for the replica Viking beater in the previous post, as well as a bone pickup stick and some antler bobbins which I will blog about shortly. It is very similar to the other Birka patterns I have done.

Bjorn supplied me with some 28 gauge sterling silver wire to use for the brocade, but I couldn't make it turn corners sharply enough. You can see my attempt to use it at left in the picture below. When that failed I turned to Devere's sterling silver metalic thread around a cotton core. It is very nice to work with, my favourite brocade thread so far. I used it double stranded.

Bjorn liked the band, originally intended for cuffs around his tunic, enough to commission more of the same- this time to go around the neck- in return for a chest, so I'm about to start on a second metre of it.

To the right are the items I have been using as a beater. The ruler is provided not for scale, but because I used it as a beater for all my projects last year. It works very well.

Above it is a bone folder. I'm told it can be bought at any craft store and is used for things like bookbinding and paper crafts (it was a gift). It also works very well, and looks unobtrusive doing it.

The top item is based on an object found at Visby which is thought to be a beater. It is pictured below and you can read about it at ArkeoDok, although apparently since that page was written the item has been more firmly identified as a tablet weaving beater.

All these items look somewhat similar, but they are quite different from the tablet weaving warp beaters depicted in 14th/15th century manuscripts. These are of wood and resemble swords or knives (or sometimes, seem more like baseball bats or popsicles- see the lineup I have assembled below). Eventually I will get myself one of these.

Every now and then I get a little excited about some book just because it has some passing reference to something I'm currently researching. Sakrale Gewänder des Mittelalters (Hirmer Verlag Muenchen, 1955) piqued my curiosity a few months ago due to being cited by a few people in relation to the Girdle of Witgarius. It happened to be on offer cheap second hand on Amazon at the time and I couldn't help myself. So, what does this book say about the Girdle (my translation from the German)?

Red, tablet woven silk band with narrow, yellow-green edges, in the middle cut into two pieces and sewn together. At both ends trapezoidal end pieces sewn on. Brocade in gold thread forms the field for the inscription in red relief: "WITGARIO TRIBVTI SACRO SPIRAMINE PLENVM x HANC ZONAM REGINA NITENS SANCTISSIMA HEMMA x. On the end pieces, in red and white, the warp creates the pattern: Eagle white on red, correspondingly on the back side red on white, in which on both sides the white …

There is a line drawing of a shuttle on page 36 of Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England. AD 450-700 by Walton Rogers described as "a bone band-weaver's shuttle, around whichthe weft would have been wound, from a 7th century settlement at Charlton,Hampshire".

There was some effort a few years ago on the SCA-Card-Weaving list to track down the original object, but details surrounding the 1970s dig seem to be lost to the mists of time.

At Canterbury Faire earlier this month, I had a discussion with a gentle I hadn't met before about this picture. He was a woodworker and spent quite a bit of time over the event working in our encampment, where we had various crafty things going on. Near the end of the event, I came back from somewhere or other to find the below item beside my loom. I didn't see him again to thank him! It's things like this that make Canterbury Faire really special.

I finally got some photos of a couple of items I finished long after the tablet weaving for them was complete, and thought I'd share. They are the Kentish band on metal strips on purple silk, which has been turned into the neck and bicep trim in my new day bliaut, and the "Dogs and Flowers" cingulum.

The cingulum lay unfinished for a long time because I couldn't work out how to finish it. I wanted it to look like the one below, which is one of the figures from Chartres cathedral. The dangly bits are tied loosely in a reef knot and the length of them seems to have many horizontal lines. I haven't managed to find any theories on how exactly this was achieved. Obviously the resulting dangly bits must be quite heavy for the knot to stay open like that.

In the end I just bound the length of the ends in (cheap, synthetic) piping. Obviously the materials are way off, but the look is pretty good I think. The knot stays in place no problem, and the weight also means …